Tying Marketo Leads w/ SEM: Without Specific Landing Pages or Forms

[Anonymous]

My company is a women's wellness retreat - so our goals are for people to contact us and talk to our sales staff about programs, and (ultimate goal) make a reservation for the retreat.

Our company is working with a third party group that is independently tracking our SEM leads, and this keeps us from tracking appropriately in Marketo - i.e. creating unique forms or landing pages for people to be sent to us via an ad - obviously making it difficult to report on revenue earned via ad campaigns if someone converts (makes a reservation) with us. My main thought is to:

1. Create a smart campaign to identify leads that originally came in with a specific UTM
2. Place these leads into a specific program relating to that ad campaign/UTM
3. Sync this program with an SFDC campaign
4. Track inquiries/activity/reservations via SFDC campaigns

BUT I cannot quite figure out how to get the smart campaign to work (how to identify people w/ specific UTM? is the a hidden "source" field in a contact form the only way to do this...?)

Thoughts on that workaround or other suggestions?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Usually what I do in this case is create an SEM add with a parameter associated to it.  You can easily add these parameters in Adwords for example when you create the add.  So when someone clicks the add it will go to your landing page, but will also have some paramet data associated with it.  for example

Regular url:  www.landingpage.com

with parameter:  www.landingpage.com?parameter=WellnessAd

Now when you filter in your campaign you use:   referrer url contains WellnessAd

This will filter out all of the people who clicked on that specific ad.

You can do this for ad groups or ad campaigns as well if you don;t want to be so specific at the individual ad level.

I hope this helps.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Now when you filter in your campaign you use:   referrer url contains WellnessAd

Wouldn't rely on the referrer, though.  For example, if the third-party landing pages run over https:// and yours do not, this will not work. Also no guarantee that they won't redirect internally to strip off the querystring on purpose.

Taylor, are you saying this third party refuses to provide you with source information?   Can you explain a little further exactly what purpose they are serving and what's going on in this interstitial step?  Are they posting only aggregate data to you, and if so, how?

[Anonymous]

It's not that they won't tell us but we want to be able to track people on our own, separately from the independent company. However, the way they operate keeps us from making specific forms or landing pages for ad campaigns -- though leads are still funneling through our normal contact form.

Fortunately our pages don't funnel through an https:// so are we thinking a parameter might work - i.e. everyone coming in w/ this URL parameter is a member of this program/campaign?

Thanks for your help!

[SanfordWhiteman]

If you can reliably get the parameter, then sure.  That's pretty much the way you should track any campaign, rather than using the referrer.  Here, you're using something more fragile because you're expecting the original parameter to be relayed to you via the next hop's referrer.  Again, if it works, it works!